>>>opposite of a Spiritual Atheist?

Who is the opposite of a Spiritual Atheist? A Theistic Spiritualist? Never mindthe label, such a question usually implies what Larry Siedentop calls “a competition of beliefs” in his new book, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. “Is it mere coincidence that liberal secularism developed in the Christian West?” Siedentop asks while pointing to Christianity as the true fount of western liberalism rather than renaissance or enlightenment.

What separates the Christian West from the rest of the world is the religious notion of ‘moral equality’, he argues. He also locates it in St Paul’s original formulations (whom he dubs as being possibly the “greatest revolutionary in humanhistory”). Paul’s ideas were amplified by arguments of lawyers and philosophers in the 12th- 13th centuries, he adds.

By that logic, if God created all humans as equals, He also supposedly fashioned them as ‘rational agents with free will’.

Now, the crucial question: who is the uber-revolutionary, St Paul or Jesus Christ? According to Siedentop, it was St Paul who really spread Jesus’ revolutionary “revelation about God being potentially present in every believer”.